Mr. Electrico aimed to perform wonders, mostly by manipulating electricity. For one central part of his show, he sat in an electric chair and electrocuted himself, then passed that power out to the audience via a metal sword. On the night Bradbury attended, Mr. Electrico chose him, pressing the sword to the young Bradbury’s skin. His hair standing on end, the boy gazed up at Mr. Electrico, who passed along a two-word directive for a life that would become one of the largest in American letters: “Live forever.”
What a blessing to hear those words at age 12, when it seems just possible enough that death might never come, when an uncle’s funeral might seem to be a minor inconvenience rather than a reminder of what is coming. To be 12 in a small town is to seriously examine the possibility of living forever and to greet each day as a forgiving learning curve, because of how well you know the contours of your own life and setting.
But what a curse those words might have been to a Bradbury who never found his way toward esteem and success. What a disappointment to live a life under the banner of something impossible and find time slowly eating you away. How many boys and girls did Mr. Electrico tell to live forever? And how disappointing is it that the one who gave it his best possible shot ultimately failed?
You already know Ray Bradbury. Even if you’ve never read a single one of his works, you know him because he’s dissipated into the American cultural ether as surely as Superman, Peanuts, or the early Charlie Chaplin shorts. I’d read a little Bradbury in my junior high school years, when I gobbled up any science fiction or fantasy I could find in my small town’s musty little library, but I remember being disappointed by Fahrenheit 451, perhaps the man’s most famous work. I thought, “That was it?” I’d expected a far-flung flight of imagination, not an occasionally didactic story about the dangers of censorship.
To be fair to 13-year-old me, he was seeking something to fill a Star Wars-shaped hole he didn’t know existed in his life; he’d never seen those films, and Bradbury’s more earthbound sci-fi appealed less than wilder space operas that had unusual alien races and feats of derring-do. Though I more or less like Fahrenheit 451 upon revisiting it as an adult, it’s still not my favorite book in Bradbury’s lineup. It is a little didactic, more interested in being a concept than a living, breathing work of literature. But, then, I’ve never liked a Bradbury novel as much as I’ve liked any of his short stories.
Those short stories popped up at key points in my life as well: “The Fog Horn” a dot on the point of a treacherous seventh-grade landscape, “The Sound Of Thunder” a speck on the horizon of the long fall when a college-aged version of myself lost a grandfather and watched as his country fell into a war it only started climbing out of a decade later. Yet I’d never sat down and read through Bradbury’s stories in bulk until this project, when I picked up the essential collection Bradbury Stories, assembled by the author himself for publication in 2003, the most effective memoir he could ever have written. In 100 tales, Bradbury effortlessly moves between the three modes most common in his work: science fiction, tales of small-town life, and fairy stories, often with sparklingly dark hearts.
Embedded throughout are snippets of a life that seems to tread close to Bradbury’s own, as with the young married couple of “Remember Sascha?,” who make up a voice for their unborn child that becomes an almost ghostly presence in their home. He writes, and she supports his writing. They are happy with that life, even as her growing midsection hints at a new, different topography to come. Yet the end is almost sad, as the voice of Sascha gives way to a real, bawling baby girl. (Bradbury and his wife—who were married for 56 years until her death in 2003—had four daughters.) Sascha is a specter that can be anything the young couple wants him to be, but the baby girl in her mother’s arms is something else entirely, a concrete person who will escape the bounds of her parents’ gravity soon enough.
That, at its heart, is the great theme of Bradbury’s work, particularly his stories: Things are always slipping behind you, irrevocably, into the past, and the more you try to hold onto them, the less definition they maintain between your fingertips. Even in his science fiction, Bradbury keeps his feet planted firmly on Earth, staring up into the stars with wonder.
Bradbury chooses to open Stories with two pieces that seem as direct an encapsulation of his work and themes as any he’d ever write. In a very real sense, they are his career in a nutshell. When discussing this project, a colleague mentioned to me that she eventually stopped reading Bradbury’s works because she felt as if she’d eventually experienced all he had to offer, and the rest of his body of work would offer up diminishing returns. To a degree, that’s true. The further one gets into Stories—or any collection of his writing—the more little pieces of Bradbury surface over and over again: the constant use of writer protagonists, the name Douglas, the happy-go-lucky do-gooderism that curdles into condescension every so often. To read those first two stories in Stories is to read all Bradbury stories, in some ways, but it’s also a perfect introduction to a young writer who was only just honing his craft.
The first, “The Whole Town’s Sleeping,” dates to 1950 and finds Bradbury in a favorite mode: the early-20th-century quaint town that hides deep, dark secrets. Bradbury spent much of his career trying to use his words to re-create Waukegan and a world that was already beginning to disappear when he met Mr. Electrico, as if trying to get back to some more innocent state that existed before he moved to Los Angeles at the age of 13. Yet his small-town stories often contain hints of darkness and menace, of a place that’s slipping just out of its orbit and plunging toward a black hole. In “The Whole Town’s Sleeping,” the black hole takes the form of a serial killer.
Our heroine is Lavinia Nebbs, the kind of resourceful girl Bradbury would turn to again and again. Her age is amorphous, seeming to dance between 14 and 24, depending on the scene, but the important thing is that she and her friends Francine and Helen are just cocksure enough to go out on a warm summer’s evening to see a Charlie Chaplin picture at the local movie theater. To collect her friends, Lavinia has to walk through a ravine, in which she stumbles upon the killer’s latest victim, naturally setting her and her friends to fright. Yet they also surmise that the killer takes breaks between his murders, that they’ll be fine if his appetites have been sated. They go to the movie, and they dawdle, because it’s a beautiful night, and they live in a beautiful town, and they are too scared to go home straight off. But soon enough, they must turn their steps homeward.
The thing I think sets Bradbury’s short stories apart is his absolutely devastating skill at picking exactly the right closing line. There are some stories where he pushes too hard and goes for the didactic or mawkish. But in most cases, he suggests the shape of the thing without suggesting what happens. (For a superb example of this, read how he uses insects to let readers know exactly what happens to the two protagonists of his post-apocalyptic tale “And The Rock Cried Out.”) “The Whole Town’s Sleeping” is particularly stellar in this regard, because Bradbury sets up the expectation that Lavinia will meet the killer on her way home. She will succumb to his fury, but the reader, at least, will know his identity. Our need for horror will be sated, but so will our need for justice. Someone knows who killed Lavinia.
Instead, Bradbury chooses to have Lavinia make the stupidest imaginable journey home—she peels off her friends one by one, then rejects one friend’s offer to stay at her house, then walks through that dark ravine alone—but Bradbury doesn’t do anything to her. She comes across an affable police officer, whose friendliness seems almost menacing in this particular light. She hears someone walking behind her in the ravine and screams. She races home, climbs up on her porch, unlocks her door, and she gets home. She’s safe. The sanctity of the beautiful town has preserved itself, and she will live, indeed, forever, a heroine frozen in that moment where she stands against the safe, wooden cool of her front door.
And then the last line: “Behind her in the living room, someone cleared his throat.”
To write a last line that good! It’s a twist ending, sure, but it’s also the thematic point of the piece in one sentence. That is, the place that seems good and safe often isn’t, and the darkness almost always lurks in the place where you’d least want it. My impression is that Bradbury goes on a bit with the description in some of these tales. It’s all good description, and he comes up with some absolutely powerful images, but it can also seem as if he needs to capture every detail and moment before that final moment. “The Whole Town’s Sleeping” also explains this frequent problem quite succinctly: Bradbury’s not just luxuriating in this ghostly small town that no longer exists; he’s prolonging Lavinia’s life by making the reader notice—if not Lavinia herself—everything she is about to lose. She stands perched, at the end, between the beauty and the dream of life and the desolation of the black hole. And that is where she is left, forever about to die, but also forever on the cusp of some greater understanding.
The second story, “The Rocket,” also dating to the apparently watershed year of 1950, shades these general themes in with the promise and peril of science fiction, but it never once leaves Earth. The only thing that marks it as science fiction, really, is that it takes place in a world where space travel to other planets in the solar system happens regularly. (This is a story I know I’ve read previously somewhere, though I can’t pin it down on my mental Bradbury map. While I suspect I’ve read it, it’s possible it just passed so thoroughly into the ether that I know it simply from having grown up in the United States. Without having read it, it’s possible that I learned it from a frequency we can all tune into that we don’t know we already hear.) Here, our hero is Fiorello Bodoni, and Bradbury quickly sketches in what his life looks like via perfectly chosen, concrete details. He’s a working-class man, employed in a scrapyard. He has a huge family. Even his name suggests an otherness—Italian, sure, but chosen in a way that suggests he’s just off the boat (even if the story never comes out and says this).
Fiorello has one dream: to travel to another planet aboard a rocket ship. Travel to the stars is a pleasure afforded only to the rich and, though Fiorello seems content to exist within this status quo, he also chafes a bit at the idea that he will never go to Mars or see Jupiter’s Great Red Spot up close. As the story begins, Fiorello has saved up enough to send one member of the family to Mars. His children quickly realize, however, that the family member who gets to go will forever hold that position over everyone else’s heads, even if he or she never mentions it. His wife, who thinks the plan is rather crazy, ends up winning the impromptu drawing of straws to travel to another world, but she ultimately turns the opportunity down. It’s more important for the family to stay whole than anything else.
You must be logged in to comment
Showing 52 Reasonable Discussions